Aspects of the present invention relate to creating an ontology that can be used to build a semantic web, and more particularly to a method, system and computer program product for creating an ontology using one or more online encyclopedias and one or more tag clouds.
The World Wide Web or Internet has provided humans with the capability to perform many tasks, such as locating information on a variety of different subjects. Web pages are designed for humans, making such tasks easily completed by a human but difficult if not nearly impossible for a machine or computer system. An evolving development of the World Wide Web in which the meaning or semantics of information is defined in a form that is more understandable by computers is the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web may enable computers to perform the tedious tasks of finding and combining information from the Web. One step in creating the Semantic Web may be to create an ontology that can be used to classify web pages. The process of creating an ontology typically involves assembling a panel of “subject matter experts” to determine the contents and structure of the ontology. Because of the vastness of the information on the web, creating an ontology in this manner may prove to be impractical.